Clara Schumann

Clara Schumann was born Clara Wieck in 1819 in Leipzig, in Germany. According to the diary her father kept for her, she did not say a single word until she was four or five. Her father wrote that her ear had simply become more open to music than to speech. He was a well-known piano teacher, and he had decided even before she was born that she would become a famous pianist. When she was four, her parents separated, and she stayed with her father. From the age of five he gave her a piano lesson every day.

At nine she played in public for the first time, at the Gewandhaus, the great concert hall of Leipzig. She later liked to tell what happened that night. The hall usually sent a beautiful glass coach to fetch its players. But the coach that came for “Miss Clara” was a large, plain one, and several girls in party dresses were already sitting in it. It stopped again and again, and more girls got in. It was also going the wrong way. Clara asked a lady, “This is not the way to the Gewandhaus, is it?” “No, we are going to a village,” said the lady. Clara began to cry. Then people shouted from behind, and the coach stopped. The right coach came and took her to the hall. The other coach was taking guests to a dance, and it had really come for another girl called Clara. She arrived late and in tears. Her father gave her a bag of sweets and said, “I forgot to tell you that people are always taken to the wrong house the first time they play in public.” Then she played without a single mistake.

At 12 she played for the great poet Goethe, who was then 82. The piano stool was too low for her, so Goethe himself went to get a cushion and put it on the stool. He said that she had “more power than six boys put together,” and he sent her a medal with his portrait. Soon afterwards she gave concerts in Paris. But fame did not change her. Fifteen minutes after she came home, she was cleaning knives in the kitchen, like other ordinary girls.

In 1837 and 1838, at 18, she gave concert after concert in Vienna, and every ticket was sold. She was named Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuoso, a great honour from the Emperor’s court. A minister said that there had never been such a case, because she was a foreigner, a Protestant and so young. In Vienna she also heard Liszt for the first time. “Since I have heard Liszt,” she wrote, “I feel like a schoolgirl,” meaning that next to him she was still a beginner. Liszt, for his part, praised her playing in a newspaper for its deep and honest feeling.

When Clara was 11, the young Robert Schumann came to live in her father’s house as his pupil. He told the children ghost stories. When she was 16, they fell in love. Her father was against it, and he would not let them see each other or write. They finally went to court, and they married in 1840, the day before her 21st birthday. On the wedding day Robert gave her a diary for both of them, and they wrote in it in turns. Three years later her father made peace with them. Many years later she wrote that she thanked him every day for his strict teaching.

At 20, when her own father was praising a rival pianist in public, she wrote in her diary, “A woman must not desire to compose. There has never yet been one able to do it.” But she went on composing. In 1841 she and Robert published a book of songs together, among them her Er ist gekommen in Sturm und Regen (He Came in Storm and Rain) and Liebst du um Schönheit (If You Love for Beauty). The book did not say who had written which song. Robert wanted people to see them as “one heart and one soul.” Robert admired her music. But in their diary he wrote that it was hard for her to compose. She had the children to care for, and a husband who was always lost in his own music. He was often sad to think how many of her beautiful ideas were lost.

Clara had eight children in thirteen years, and she kept on giving concerts. In 1842, at 22, she went on a concert tour with Robert. When he had to go home for the music magazine he ran, she travelled on alone to Copenhagen. “I earn nothing at home,” she wrote. “Why should I not earn a little for Robert with my talent?” In 1849, at 29, a rising broke out in Dresden, where they lived. They had four children then. Armed men were taking men from their homes to fight, so Clara and Robert escaped from the city with their eldest daughter. The three small children stayed behind with a servant. At three in the morning Clara walked back into the city, past armed men, and led the children left behind out across the fields. She was seven months pregnant.

In June 1853, at 33, she began to compose again, after seven years. She wrote six songs, among them An einem lichten Morgen (On a Bright Morning) and O Lust, o Lust (O Joy, O Joy). She wrote that nothing was greater than the joy of creating music, because then she lived “in a world of sound.” That autumn the young Johannes Brahms came to their door. She wrote that he came “as if sent straight from God.”

The next year Robert became mentally ill, and he was taken to a hospital near Bonn. The doctors did not let Clara visit him. Brahms helped her to run the home, and he went to see Robert for her. To earn money, Clara went back on the concert stage. She wrote that she wanted to pay for Robert’s care herself, so that if he got well, nothing would remind him of this time. In July 1856, at 36, she was at last allowed to see him. “He smiled, and put his arm round me with a great effort,” she wrote. “Not all the treasures in the world could equal this embrace.” Two days later he died.

For the next 35 years Clara toured all over Europe, and she travelled to England 19 times. She gave well over a thousand concerts, many of them with the violinist Joseph Joachim. She played Robert’s music everywhere, and she edited the first complete edition of his works. Once Brahms wrote to her that her tours were only a way of earning money. She answered that they were not. As long as she had the strength, she felt it was her task to play great music, Robert’s above all. Her art, she wrote, was “the air in which I breathe.” But she “would rather starve than play in public with only half my powers,” meaning that she would never give a concert unless she could play her best. From 1878, at 58, she also taught at a new music school in Frankfurt. At her last concert, in 1891, at 71, the audience applauded so much that she had to play the whole piece again. In her seventies her hearing grew weak, and orchestras sounded “all wrong” to her. But she could still hear the piano, and she went on teaching.

Clara’s life was full of sorrow, but she never stopped working. In 1870 her son Ludwig, like his father, became mentally ill, and he spent the rest of his life in a hospital. She wrote that it was as if he had been “buried alive.” In 1872 her daughter Julie died at 27. According to Clara’s diary, the news came on the day of a concert. She told no one, and she played. Her son Felix, a gifted young poet, died at 24, and Brahms set some of his poems to music. In 1891 her son Ferdinand died at 41, and Clara, then 71, took his children into her home. In all, she outlived four of her eight children.

Brahms stayed close to her for the rest of her life. He often showed her his new works and asked for her advice, and she played many of them for the first time. They loved each other deeply, and their letters show it. They sometimes argued, but they always made peace. In words she wrote for her children, she said that in her hardest years he had come “as a true friend, to bear all my sorrow with me,” and that “I never loved a friend as I love him.”

In March 1896, at 76, Clara had a stroke. One day in May her grandson played her some of Robert’s music. After each piece he asked if he should go on, and she nodded. After a slow, gentle piece by Robert called Romance, she said, “That is enough.” It was the last music she heard. She died in Frankfurt in May 1896, and she was buried beside Robert in Bonn. Brahms stood at her grave, and he died less than a year later.

Clara was strong, hard-working and strict with herself, and she had a warm sense of humour. Again and again her life was struck by sorrow, first her husband and then her children, but she never stopped working, and she always played her best. She was one of the greatest pianists of her century, and for more than sixty years she brought the music of Robert, Brahms and the great masters to audiences all over Europe. Her own songs and piano music, warm and finely made, are loved again today. Like her music, the way she lived her life still gives courage to many people.